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There are examples of social science research studies that use social media data in most of the chapters of this textbook. If you are interested in using Facebook data for your own project, it is important to review the studies discussed in Chapter 3 on the Facebook ethics controversy. In addition, research by the sociologist Hanna (2013) on using Facebook to study social movements may be a useful starting point. Hanna reviewed procedures for analyzing social movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy movements by applying text mining methods to Facebook data. Hanna uses the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK; www.nltk.org) and the R package ReadMe (http://gking.harvard.edu/readme) to analyze mobilization patterns of Egypt’s April 6 youth movement. He corroborated results from his text mining methods with in-depth interviews with movement participants.

If you are interested in using Twitter data, two Twitter-based thematic analysis (see Chapter 11) studies are good places to start. The first is a study of the live Twitter chat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted by Lazard, Scheinfeld, Bernhardt, Wilcox, and Suran (2015). Lazard’s team collected, sorted, and analyzed users’ tweets to reveal major themes of public concern with the symptoms and life span of the virus, disease transfer and contraction, safe travel, and protection of one’s body. Lazard and her team used SAS Text Miner (www.sas.com/en_us/software/analytics/text-miner.html) to organize and analyze the Twitter data.

A second thematic analysis study that uses Twitter data is by the mental health researchers Shepherd, Sanders, Doyle, and Shaw (2015). The researchers assessed how Twitter is used by individuals with experience of mental health problems by following the hashtag #dearmentalhealthprofessionals and conducting a thematic analysis to identify common themes of discussion. They found 515 unique communications that were related to the specified conversation. The majority of the material related to four overarching themes: (1) the impact of diagnosis on personal identity and as a facilitator for accessing care, (2) balance of power between professional and service user, (3) therapeutic relationship and developing professional communication, and (4) support provision through medication, crisis planning, service provision, and the wider society.

Conclusion

This chapter has addressed the role played by data in social science research and provided an overview of the advantages and limitations of digital data as a way to collect information from people in support of such human-centered research projects. The chapter has overviewed a number of online data sources, with forward pointers to Chapters 5 and 6, which specifically address aspects relevant to data collection and data sampling. Examples of social science research projects that make use of information obtained from digital resources were also provided, mainly as an illustration of the kind of research questions that can be answered with this kind of data; more such examples are provided in the following chapters (specifically in Chapters 10 through 12).